Stuart Duffin RSA (master printmaker and member of the Royal Scottish Academy) has every right to hold very mixed feelings about A Redder Sun, his current exhibition at the Glasgow Print Studio. The show opened on October 6, the very day before the Hamas and Islamic Jihad attacks on Israel began the latest, grizzly episode in the 75-year Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
This extensive exhibition of politically and morally charged prints was inspired, to a very considerable degree, by a number of residencies Duffin completed in the divided city of Jerusalem. The artist says that he, “sees the welfare of Jerusalem as a barometer to the wellbeing of our own basic humanity, not only as individuals, but collectively as a global society.”
In the three weeks since his exhibition opened that barometer has struggled to measure the levels of violence and anguish. Israel suffered the single greatest number of dead (more than 1,400 military and civilian) on any day since the creation of the self-declared Jewish state in 1948.
For their part, the people of Gaza, caged in the largest open prison in human history, are joined by the desperate Rohingya people of Myanmar as the very image of Frantz Fanon’s “wretched of the Earth”. The number of Palestinians killed in Gaza as a consequence of Israeli military action since October 7 is at least 7,700.
Add these hideous numbers to figures for the Israel-Palestine conflict since 2000 (as produced by the brave Israeli human rights group B’Tselem), and the death tolls over the last 23 years of war are more than 18,000 Palestinians and in excess of 2,700 Israelis (a ratio of more than six Palestinians to every Israeli, even after taking the October 7 attack into account).
As Israel’s “total siege”, relentless aerial bombardment and, now, ground incursions bite ever harder on the 2.3 million beleaguered civilians (most of them children) in Gaza, Duffin’s exhibition takes on a bleak immediacy that he could not possibly have foreseen.
Employing the fascinating technique of mezzotint (the art of printmaking using engraved copper plates that dates back to the 17th century), Duffin has created a series of works that express his obsession with conflict and resolution. Juxtaposition is to the fore as the artist combines established religious imagery with centuries-old traditions of ideological texts and representations of politicised, modern urbanism.
For instance, in one work, titled Still My Angel, a statuesque angel (a figure from all three Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity and Islam) is set above a photographic portrayal of “Jerusalem Street”. Both are raised above a sign that reads, ironically: “This street is a designated riot area: please take your litter home. Council by-law…”
Around this central combination of images and words are set a series of smaller, exquisite images representing precious objects, people and texts. In its detail and allusiveness, the print (like the exhibition as a whole) is reminiscent of aspects of Prospero’s Books (Peter Greenaway’s great adaptation of Shakespeare’s play The Tempest).
Indeed, intriguingly, Duffin’s work also invites comparisons with the visual (often montage) art of Derek Jarman (who, of course, was a contemporary and outstanding fellow filmmaker of Greenaway’s). Duffin’s series of palimpsests (revisionist texts of political and/or moral significance) could, likewise, have emerged in the work of the two English artists.
In the work titled Smile – You’re On Camera, a Banksy-esque image of a graffitied wall (complete with cartoonish representations of CCTV cameras) is juxtaposed with a delicately printed text in the stylish font of a bygone era. The text is headed: “The Individualist’s Palimpsest.”
The accompanying script (one of various, often conflicting palimpsests in the show) suggests that it is, “no longer desirable or even possible to give up self to a greater cause.”
Set beside the urban graffiti representing near ubiquitous surveillance, this philosophical speculation takes us into truly Orwellian territory. Perhaps the most frighteningly premonitory print in the entire show is the one titled High Tower of the Said City. A depiction of a crumbling Babylon is set beside Duffin’s “riot area” motif and above photographic representations of Jerusalem at night.
At the centre of three images of Jerusalem sits the Al-Aqsa Mosque. UN Secretary-General António Guterres has been castigated outrageously by the Israeli government for daring to put the October 7 atrocities against Israeli civilians into a historical context.
Yet, wiser people than him have explained that the actions of the Gaza militants were, in part, a response to Israeli incursions into the Al-Aqsa Mosque following the formation of Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition government. Duffin’s visual association of Babylon and Al-Aqsa is, surely, more powerful and chilling than the artist could ever have expected.
In addition to brilliantly conceived and executed prints, the show includes a cabinet of objects and two short films. The objects include a number that Duffin brought back from Jerusalem, such as a street sign made of tiles that reads “Jaffa Road” in English, Arabic and Hebrew.
There is even greater poignancy in a street sign that appears in the short film titled Still Dreaming of Jerusalem (which runs to nine minutes, 30 seconds). Reading “Street of Prophets” (again in the languages of the one-time British occupiers of Palestine, and of its Arab and Jewish inhabitants), the sign reminds us of the many commonalities of the three Abrahamic faiths.
Indeed, modern day talk of a “Judeo-Christian” tradition (rather than an Abrahamic one) is rarely Biblical in nature and is, more often than not, an Islamophobic insistence on putting a wedge between the nominal “West” (including Israel) and the Islamic world. One cannot help but prefer Duffin’s belief, expressed in his programme notes, in, “dialogue, building bridges, not walls between opposing communities.”
Duffin’s film of Jerusalem (which is enhanced powerfully by heartbreakingly beautiful music by Malcolm Lindsay) is an important, contextualising element in this exhibition. Overset images of a young, Muslim woman (wearing hijab) and a young, Orthodox Jewish man (wearing a black hat and sidelocks) walking on different Jerusalem streets have rarely seemed so poignant.
At Glasgow Print Studio until November 18: gpsart.co.uk
